Behind the Music Scene – June 2026

JEFF KLOETZEL’S CROSSROADS came in 2009. After two decades in Hawaii, where he’d worked in real estate and established himself as a go-to guitar player in the tight-knit island’s music scene, he’d chucked it all—“I packed everything up, gave notice at my job, gave notice to my bands, and pretty much gave up music entirely,”—to embark on a six-month mainland road trip with his longtime, long-distance girlfriend. He brought a guitar, but “barely touched it.”

As the trip wound down and as they entered San Francisco to begin their new life together, his girlfriend turned to him and said, “All right, where am I dropping you off?”

“It was just too much time in the car for her, her dog and myself,” he recalls, fortunately with a chuckle.

His plans wrecked, the wounded Maryland-raised Kloetzel went to visit his parents, who’d moved to Ashland a few years prior, and stayed for nine months. Then he bought a foreclosure in Medford and began what he assumed would be a quick job search.

Unfortunately, he’d arrived during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The quick search became a three-year odyssey until he found part-time work with South Stage Cellars. During that time, he turned back to something very familiar: music.

Save for the ill-fated six-month road trip, music had always been part of Jeff Kloetzel’s life. Born into a musical family (his parents met singing in a choir, and one sister is a professional cellist, the other a dancer and choreographer), he’d played professionally for years, peaking in Hawaii, where he was a reliable sideman for some of the island’s biggest acts. Now, staring ahead at an uncertain future, he began busking at local farmers’ markets. “It was kind of a phoenix-like moment,” he says, “that crash-and-burn where I don’t know anyone and I’m starting at the bottom with a tip jar on a street corner.”

“The reinvention that was forced on me was a good thing,” he continues. “It made me think about what will make people stop and listen—and maybe drop something in your tip jar.”

Eventually, his gigs expanded to include South Stage’s Jacksonville tasting room, but cracking the limited local scene wasn’t easy. “I think there were maybe three wineries that played music then,” he says, but he kept at it. Kloetzel experimented and honed his craft, playing with a band for seven years, writing hundreds of songs, networking and building his solo act. Last year, he played 178 gigs.

Seventeen years past his crossroads, Jeff Kloetzel has put down roots and become a fixture on the local music scene, a role he says fits him perfectly. “I’m not looking to go too far afield,” he says serenely. “There’s enough here.”